In 2012, we noticed that many of the most exciting Stripe users were building businesses that helped others accept money. Shopify was helping e-commerce businesses get started and Postmates was building a mobile restaurant delivery network. In October 2012, we launched Stripe Connect to allow these multi-sided platforms to connect with thousands of seller accounts on Stripe.

Plenty has changed since then. The number of these platforms has exploded: services like Instacart, Kickstarter, Shyp, Tilt, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and Handy. Stripe has helped over half a million sellers get paid on platforms like these. And we’ve learned a lot about the subtleties of each use case.

Regular businesses just need to accept money from buyers, but running one of these platforms is much more complex. They also have to verify seller identity (to comply with know-your-customer laws and to prevent fraud), collect and verify their sellers’ banking information, track seller earnings, help sellers get paid on the right schedule, handle IRS tax reporting requirements, and more. I get tired just thinking about it.

The new Stripe Connect is the result of everything we’ve learned from powering these platforms. The changes we’ve made make setting up accounts for sellers even easier—they don’t need to even come to Stripe. You can now support sellers in more countries. And Stripe helps with everything involved in operating the platform.

Managed accounts

In addition to connecting to regular Stripe accounts (which Connect has supported since 2012), we’re now enabling platforms to spin up and administer “managed accounts”. Managed accounts allow you to customize all aspects of the experience for sellers—from what the setup flow looks like and payment schedules to who pays fees and when info is collected. These managed accounts can be set up for sellers wherever Stripe is supported (18 countries, with more coming this year). This unifies our previously-separate “Transfers API” with Connect.

New Lightweight setup for sellers

With managed accounts, Stripe gets out of the way of your relationship with your sellers or contractors. You can fully customize how sellers join your platform and build very lightweight sign up flows. In fact, you can get a seller started with just a country and email address using the new accounts endpoint:

We’ll send back the seller’s account information, which you can use to start creating charges on their behalf right away. We’ll let you know via the account.updated webhook if and when you need to collect any additional info about your sellers.

When creating charges, you can also specify the seller receiving the funds. Stripe will handle paying out the seller on the schedule you specified, and you won’t need to manually reconcile payments and transfers, making accounting and bookkeeping easier:

New International sellers

Scaling businesses internationally can be pretty hard, but it’s especially difficult for platforms. Traditionally, supporting sellers in other countries required you to either run all international transactions through the U.S. (which meant more declined cards and currency conversion fees) or registering local business entities in every region supported.

With Connect, we’ve worked to help you provide a local experience for your sellers while keeping your code manageable and scalable. For example, you might need a Spanish crowdfunding campaign’s Número de Identificación Fiscal or an Australian boutique’s ABN before they can get paid. In all these cases, we’ll help you out and let you know what info to collect via the aptly-named fields_needed array on the account.

Update Build apps for Stripe users

As before, you can use Connect to get secure access to Stripe data, and use that to build dashboards, invoicing integrations, feature add-ons, and more. If you like being meta, you can now also create integrations specifically for platforms, such as the one built by QuickBooks for self-employed workers.

Pricing

Nearly all of Connect’s functionality is free. The cost for accepting payments remains the same. Setting up managed accounts costs just 0.5% of funds paid out—this flat rate includes ID verification, helping to generate tax documents where necessary, and even international accounts.

We’re thrilled to see diverse marketplaces and platforms being built and grown on Stripe.

Marketplaces have always been a big deal (just ask Bill Gurley), but we think that they’re likely to become more important still. As the rise of smartphones lets internet businesses to make the leap from the virtual to the real world, we think that enormously successful marketplaces and platforms remain to be built. We look forward to building the most useful tools and APIs for them along the way.

Thanks very much to our beta users for their feedback which has helped us shape the product. If you have any questions, get in touch!

As we expand the range of payment types that we support, we’ve released a new API version to unify the interface across payments of all types.

Globally, credit cards are the source of most online payments but they’re far from ubiquitous. Local payment mechanisms (such as China’s prominent e-wallets) power commerce in markets around the world. Meanwhile, novel payment types, from digital currencies to Apple Pay, are establishing new standards for online transactions.

In accepting these new instruments, there’s a lot to be excited about: broader global reach, increased revenue, and improved user experience. We want to make supporting them as easy as possible—hence building this unified API. For essentially all purposes, a payment is a payment regardless of where it came from. Payments of all types behave identically in the API and Dashboard.

Here’s a quick overview of the new API version:

UpdateCreate a charge from a source

Charge objects returned by the API now have a source property in place of the card property. This describes the source that you used for the charge, such as a card or Bitcoin receiver.

You can still create a charge using the card parameter, but it is now superseded by the source parameter.

UpdateManage customer sources

Customer objects now have the sources and default_source properties in place of cards and default_card. Similarly, we’ve introduced the new request parameters source and default_source although the old parameters will be supported indefinitely.

There is a new API endpoint for managing the customer’s payment sources beyond just cards: /v1/customers/{CUSTOMER_ID}/sources.

Switching to the source property means that you don’t need additional code changes to accept the new payment types that we add over time. We’ve made this switch as easy as possible: old API versions include both the old and new properties on all responses. For instance, if you charge a card on an old API version then the charge object will have identical card and source properties. If you charge an Alipay account on an old API version then the card property will be null and the source property will be the Alipay account.

If you have questions or feedback about this change, then we’d love to hear from you!

Outdated card details are a big problem for online businesses. If your customers get a new card from their banks (or the number or expiry date changes), they have to manually re-add it to every service or the service stops working. It’s frustrating for customers, and loses paying customers for businesses needlessly.

We’ve rolled out support for handling new cards nicely. Now, when you save a customer with Stripe, their card will continue to work even if the physical card gets replaced by the bank. Stripe works directly with card networks so that your customers can continue using your service without interruption.

There’s no extra work required, and this feature works with most MasterCard, Discover, and Visa cards—without this improvement, over half of the cards stored with Stripe in the last year would stop working by 2016 if they weren’t updated.

The saved card only stays working as long as the credit or debit card account stays open. Your customers won’t have to worry about being billed after they’ve canceled their subscription or after they’ve closed a credit card account.

We hope this makes life easier for you and your users alike. If you have any questions or feedback, get in touch!

Using data from across the Stripe network, we’ve developed a machine learning system that evaluates charges in real-time and blocks those that are almost certainly fraudulent. By analyzing hundreds of different characteristics pertaining to each payment, these algorithms have already shielded businesses on Stripe from millions of attempted fraudulent charges.

Starting today, you can help improve these models. By letting us know when we’ve missed a charge that you believe to be fraudulent, or declined one that you think is legitimate, you can help train a model that’s optimized for your business. This ensures that the protection you receive will get better over time.

In practice, it’s very simple. In the dashboard, you can now:

Report and refund charges you believe to be fraudulent—just follow the “Report fraudulent payment” link when viewing a charge.

Mark as safe charges that Stripe blocked as suspected fraud. Charges we believe to be fraudulent will appear with a status of “Blocked” in the payments list and have a prominent message on the payment detail page. If you mark one of these charges as safe, you can retry it—we will not attempt to block it again.

There’s also equivalent functionality available in the API—check out the documentation for more details.

Over time, businesses on Stripe should not have to think about fraud and disputes. By enabling this feedback loop—between you and other businesses built on Stripe on the one hand, and our fraud detection infrastructure on the other—we’re confident that we’ll be able to deliver significant improvements in the future.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on these tools, or other thoughts about how we could better help you block fraud, please drop me a line.

Disputed payments—"chargebacks"—can be awkward and time-consuming. We’re taking advantage of the data we’ve seen across millions of transactions to make handling disputes easier and quicker, and to maximize the chance that you win disputes.

NewEnumerated evidence fields

Previously, you could only upload evidence for disputes as a string or a single file. We’ve learned that separating the type of evidence can come in handy, and you can now use typed fields such as product_description, shipping_documentation, or customer_communication in the API. (You can use the Dashboard to submit this data as well.)

NewFile uploads through the API

Before now, we only accepted evidence documents as a PDF through our dashboard. Based on your feedback, you can now upload PDFs, JPGs, or PNGs via the API or in the Dashboard.

UpdateDisputes in the Dashboard

We’ve also updated the evidence form in the Dashboard to take full advantage of these API changes. The new interface adapts to help you submit the most relevant evidence to win the dispute. For example, if a customer claims a product wasn’t received, the form will ask for shipping info if it’s a physical product or server access logs if it’s a digital service.

As much as we’d like these changes to be helpful if you face a dispute, we’re working to reduce disputes for all our users—we actually hope you have to use these tools as little as possible. If you’ve got any feedback, let us know.

We’ve added two new tools to the Dashboard to help you keep track of activity on your account.

First, it’s now easier to see activity on your account (and monitor for potentially unauthorized actions) with the security history overview. Your overview will show recent actions from all of your team members—from password and bank account changes to suspicious logins or data exports.

Second, you can now see in your logs which of your team members performed any given action through the Dashboard. This should both increase security and reduce confusion when multiple team members are managing an account.

As always, please contact us if you’re ever worried that your account has been compromised. And of course, if you have any feedback, feel free to reach out!

Starting at 10am Pacific Time this morning, you can watch The Interview at SeeTheInterview.com, powered by Stripe. The Interview was originally intended to be broadly available in theaters, but its release was curtailed after a number of distribution partners backed out.

When we announced the Open Source retreat,
we'd pictured it primarily as giving people the opportunity to work on
projects they'd already been meaning to do. However, the environment
we provided also became a place for people to come up with new ideas
and give them a try. One of these ideas, Libscore, is launching publicly today.

Top libraries used across the web.

Libscore, built by Julian
Shapiro with support from both us and Digital Ocean,
makes it possible for frontend developers to see where their work is
being used. The service periodically crawls the top million
websites, determines the JavaScript libraries in use on each, and
makes that data publicly queriable.

For example, wondering about MVC framework popularity? Backbone is
used on about 8,000 of the top million sites while Ember appears on only 185. You
can also query which libraries are used on your favorite site, or
view some precompiled aggregates.

We were attracted to Libscore because it sounded like internet
infrastructure that should exist. Sometimes—as with our support
for Alipay—we get to
build such components directly; sometimes, it seems better to support
something external—as with Stellar. If
you have other ideas, please let us know (or work on them here!).

In February 2013, we blogged about email
transparency at Stripe. Since then a number of other companies
have implemented their own versions of it (which a fewhavetalked
about publicly). We often get asked whether email transparency is
still around, and if so, how we've scaled it.

Email transparency continues to be one important tool for state
transfer at Stripe. The vast majority of Stripe email (excluding particularly
sensitive classes of email or threads where a participant has a strong
expectation of privacy) remains publicly available through the
company.

Today we're publishing two key components that have allowed us to
scale it this far: our list manager tool and updated internal
documentation reflecting what we've learned over the past year and a
half. Hopefully these will make it easier for others to run email
transparency at their own organizations.

Gaps

In the time since our first post, we've grown our mailing list
count almost linearly with headcount: from 40 employees and 119
mailing lists in February 2013 to now 164 people and 428 lists. A
plurality are project lists (sys@, sys-archive@, sys-bots@, sys-ask@),
but there's also a long tail on topics ranging from
country operations (australia@) to ideas
for things Stripe should try (crazyideas@).

We use Google Groups for our email list infrastructure. Today
we're releasing the web interface we've built on Google's APIs to make
managing many list subscriptions (and associated filters) easy. This interface, called Gaps, lets you do things like:

Quickly subscribe to or unsubscribe from a list.

View your organization's lists (categorized by topic), and which
you're subscribed to (including indirect subscriptions through other
lists).

Updated internal documentation

Scaling email transparency has required active cultural effort and
adaptation. As our team grew, we'd notice that formerly good patterns
could turn sour. For example, at first email transparency would
improve many conversations by letting people drop in with helpful
tidbits. But with a larger team, having many people jumping into a
conversation would instead grind the thread to a halt.

As we've identified cases where email transparency didn't scale
well, we've made changes to our culture. Below is our updated internal
documentation on how we approach email transparency. It embodies what
we've learned about how to make email transparency work at an
organization of our size:

Email transparency (from our internal wiki)

One of Stripe's core strategies is hiring
great people
and then making sure they have enough information to make good local
decisions. Email transparency is one system that has helped make
this possible. As with any rule at Stripe, you should consider the
recommendations in this document to be strong defaults,
which you should just override if they don't make sense in a
particular circumstance.

How it works

Email transparency is fairly simple: make your emails transparent
by CCing a list, and make it easy for others to be transparent by
observing the responsibilities below.

The main mechanisms of email transparency are the
specially-designated archive lists, to
which you should CC all mail that would normally be off-list, but only
because of its apparent irrelevance rather than out of any particular
desire for secrecy. The goal isn't to share things that would
otherwise be secret: it's to unlock the wealth of information that
would otherwise be accidentally locked up in a few people's inboxes.

In general, if you are debating including an archive list, you
should include it. This includes internal P2P email which you would
normally leave off a list, emails to vendors, and scheduling
email. Don't be afraid to send "boring" email to an archive list —
people have specifically chosen to subscribe to that list. You should
expect most people will autoarchive this list traffic (hence the
name!), and then dip into it as they prefer.

If you're new to it, email transparency always feels a bit weird
at first, but it doesn't take long to get used to it.

What's the point?

Email transparency is something few other organizations try to
do. It's correspondingly on us to make sure we have really good
indicators for how it's valuable. Here's a sample of things people
have found useful about email transparency:

Provides the full history on interactions that are relevant to
you. If you're pulled into something, you can always pull up the
relevant state. This is especially useful for external
communications with users or vendors.

Provides a way for serendipitous interactions to happen — someone
who has more state on something may notice what's happening and
jump in to help (subject to the limitations about jumping in).

Lets you keep up with things going on at various other parts of
Stripe, at whatever granularity you want. This reduces siloing,
makes it easier to function as a remote (and even just know what
we're working on), and generally increases the feeling of
connectedness.

Requires ~no additional effort from the sender.

Makes conversations persistent and linkable, which is particularly
useful for new hires.

Forces us to think about how we're segmenting information — if
you're tempted to send something off-list, you should think
through why.

Makes spin-up easier by immersing yourself in examples of Stripe
tone and culture, and enabling you to answer your own questions
via the archives.

Helps you learn how different parts of the business work.

Reader responsibilities

Email transparency cuts two ways. Being able to see the raw feed
of happenings at Stripe as they unfold is awesome, but it also
implies an obligation to consume responsibly. Overall, threads on an
archive list merit a level of civil inattention
— you should feel free to read it, but be careful about adding your
own contributions.

Talk to people rather than silently judging. If you see something on an email list that rubs you the wrong way or that you think doesn't make sense (e.g. "why are we working on that?", "that email seems overly harsh/un-Stripelike"), you should talk to that person directly (or their manager, if there's a reason you can't talk to them about it). Remember that we hire smart people, and if something seems off you're likely missing context or a view of the larger picture. No one wants their choice to send email on-list to result in a bunch of people making judgements without telling them, or chattering behind their back — if that can happen, then people will be less likely to CC a list in the future.

Avoid jumping in. A conversation on an archive list should be considered a private conversation between the participants. When people jump into the thread, it often grinds to a halt and nothing gets done. There will be some very rare occasions (e.g. if you have some factual knowledge the participants probably don't) where it's ok to lurk in to the thread, but in practice these should be very rare. By convention, the people on the thread may ignore your email; don't take it personally — it's just a way of making sure that email transparency doesn't accidentally make email communication harder. Knowing when to jump in is an art, and when in doubt, don't.

Don't penalize people for choosing to CC a list. Ideally, people are writing their emails exactly as they would if they were off-list. So be cognizant about creating additional overhead for people because they chose to CC the list. There may be typos or things that you're wondering about or don't make sense. If you're *concerned* about something being actively bad, then you should talk to the person, but if it's something small (e.g. "there's a typo", "this tone isn't Stripelike", "this conversation seems like a waste of time"), you should trust that there's either a reason, or the person's manager will be on the lookout to help them (especially if they're new).

Help others live by the above responsibilities. The only way we can preserve email transparency is by collectively nudging each other onto the right course. Whether it's poking someone to CC a list, or telling someone to stop venting about an email but just go talk to the author, the person responsible for fixing the shortfalls you see is the same as the one responsible for your availability.

Common scenarios/FAQs

I don't mind people being able to read this boring scheduling email, but I don't think it's worth anyone's time to read. You should still send it to an archive list! Archive lists are intended to be the feed of everything going on within a particular team — let the people who are subscribing decide if it's worth their time or not.

I have a small joke on this thread. Should I CC it to the list, or just send it to one person (or a small set of people)? Small jokes are good! The main cost is potentially derailing the relevant thread. So generally, if it's a productive, focused thread, just send your joke off-list, but if it's already fairly broad, then you should feel free to send the joke publicly.

I feel like I need to write my email for the broad audience that might be reading it, rather than the one person it's actually meant for. The only change between how you write emails for email transparency and how you would write them privately to other Stripes should be that one has a CC. That is, if you feel a need to rewrite your emails for the audience, then that likely indicates a bug in the organization we should fix. If you notice yourself having this tendency, talk to gdb — we should be able to shift the norms of the organization so this isn't a problem.

How do we make sure this respects outside people's expectations? In many ways, email transparency is just a more extreme version of what happens at other organizations — since it's opt-in, all of the emails are human-vetted to be shareable. Email transparency is mostly about changing the default thresholds. As a corollary, if someone requests that their email not be shared, then certainly respect their request.

Common exceptions

Like any tool, email transparency has its limitations. Since it's
in many ways a one-way communication system, email transparency is bad
for sensitive situations where people may react strongly. It's also
important to preserve people's privacy. The following is a description
of the classes of things which you may not see on an archive list.

Anything personnel related (e.g. performance).

Some recruiting conversations, especially during closing or when people are confidentially looking around. People's decision-making process at that stage is usually quite personal, and even if people have a hard time picking Stripe, we want to make sure that they start with a blank slate.

Communications of mixed personal and professional nature (e.g. recruiting a friend).

Early stage discussions about topics that will affect Stripes personally (e.g. changing our approach to compensation).

Some particularly sensitive partnerships.

As we said in the original email transparency post, it's hard to
know how far it will scale. That doesn't bother us much: we continue
to do unscalable things
until they break down. The general sentiment at Stripe is that email
transparency adds a lot of value, and it seems we'll keep being able
to find tweaks to keep it going.

Hopefully these components will help you with email transparency
in your own organization. If you end up implementing something
similar, I'd love to hear about it!